1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for operating a demultiplexer on an Inter-Integrated Circuit (‘I2C’) bus.
2. Description of Related Art
The Inter-Integrated Circuit (‘I2C’) data communications interface and protocol is used widely throughout computing and electronic systems for various reasons including the robustness and stability of the protocol. The protocol, however, does have a few limitations. The protocol is generally implemented with a master device and one or more slave devices. Each slave device is generally provided a unique address for use in communication on the I2C bus. Demultiplexers which aid in the distribution of the I2C bus to multiple slave devices, generally also function as a slave device, requiring a separate unique address. As computer systems become more complex, more I2C slaves are added, more demultiplexers are added, and many addresses are utilized in I2C bus systems. Being a serial data communications protocol, a finite number of addresses exist until additional bits are utilized. Such additional bits, however, reduce the effective bandwidth of such a bus.